The Code for Love and Heartbreak - Jillian Cantor Page 0,44
She seems really nice. Though...she told me three times I could be such a pretty girl if I took my lab coat off.”
That sounds like Mrs. Bates. She doesn’t always filter what comes out of her mouth, which is part of the reason I like her. I appreciate her honesty. But it does make me uncomfortable at times, too.
“Why do you wear the lab coat all the time?” I ask. Jane frowns, and this tenuous truce, or whatever it is we have come to now, this afternoon, might already be over. “Never mind,” I say quickly. “Forget I asked.”
She doesn’t say anything for a minute, and I half expect her to throw her laptop in her bag and run out of the diner, leaving me with the stack of surveys, two orders of cheese fries and the check. But then she slowly pushes up her right sleeve, rolls her arm over and shows me what I got only the smallest glimpse of a few weeks ago. Her entire forearm is marked with jagged pink and purple scars, going all the way up to the crease of her elbow.
“What happened?” I ask softly.
“The summer before sixth grade, I was in a car accident and it messed up my arm pretty bad. I started middle school with these really ugly fresh scars all over my arm and people never even bothered to learn my real name. Everyone called me Freddy Krueger instead. I cried almost every night for three years. I begged my mom to homeschool me.” She traces the scars on her forearm with her pointer finger now, and I can’t imagine the Jane I’ve known in coding club the past few years—serious, brilliant, confident Jane—crying every night, or wanting to be homeschooled, or worse, being teased so relentlessly at school.
I find myself staring at her arm, but not because I think her scars make her ugly or nightmarish, but because I wish I’d known about them before. I would’ve liked Jane more, understanding that, underneath, she was a little a raw, and that she felt like she didn’t fit in at our school. Just like me.
She pulls her sleeve back down, and I quickly look away, ashamed for staring. I wonder if without the lab coat Jane feels naked, exposed at school, the way I’ve felt this year without Izzy.
“I guess I made a choice, you know?” She’s still talking. “I could continue to be Freddy Kreuger in high school, or I could be the nerdy lab-coat girl. I want to be this girl in the lab coat instead.”
I nod. “I used to think it was some kind of a fashion statement I didn’t understand. But now I think I get it.” I pause for a moment. “I don’t understand people,” I admit. “Not just you, I mean...any people.” I think about all the people who were so mean to her in middle school. Why would anyone act that way? “Numbers make sense to me. People not at all.” I shrug, but even as I say it, I’m not sure it’s completely true. I think I do actually understand Jane now.
“Yeah.” She offers me a half smile. “I agree with you. People are the worst. Numbers are easy.”
I’ve respected Jane’s talent and intelligence in coding club for the past few years, but now, for the first time, I actually wonder if I might truly like her, if it’s possible we might even become friends.
* * *
I catch George up on what happened with Mr. Dodge on the way to school the next morning, and he frowns, looking anxious. He had texted me after school yesterday to ask if everything was okay, and I told him it was and I would explain what had happened in the morning, thinking it would be too hard to try and explain over text. And besides, I was engrossed in entering all the survey responses last night—I stayed up late inputting them all and then started to reconfigure my algorithm flowchart. I got hyperfocused on that, like weirdly if I got everything right there’d be no way Mr. Dodge could still shut us down.
“He should’ve called me in,” George says now, after I tell him everything. I’m not sure whether to be offended that George believes I can’t handle anything on my own, or if I should feel grateful that George wishes he could’ve helped.
“Jane and I handled it,” I say. “And Ms. Taylor was there when we left.”